Monday, 31 August 2015

We'll start with some pictures of the build process, but if you find them boring just scroll down to the next section.

I just have to mention that the assembly process was very simple and straightforward even for the guy who built his last PC about 15 years ago. Took me only a couple of hours to get both servers powered on.

Saturday, 15 August 2015

Yesterday I have been deploying my first vRA 6.2 on my home lab and the first blueprint I thought I would build was Linux Centos. The reason I chose the CentOS is pretty simple - this OS has been used in some VWware Hands on Labs I played with recently.

So I downloaded CentOS 7 Minimal install ISO and thought I would have my first blueprint ready to be deployed in no time. However, it took me 3 hours to figure out how to properly prepare Linux VM for Guest OS customization. The customization is also used with Site Recovery Manager to customize VMs after faill over and when providing VM with vRealize Automation.

I am gonna be working with vRA and blueprints for a while so I thought I would document all steps of the process and share it.

This helps vSphere to recognise the CentOS as RHEL and do proper customization.If you don't run this command you will end up with customization applied to wrong files, e.g. you will have eth0 file with the IP Address you setup in Customization profile instead of updating the actual NIC file, e.g. eno16780032

Update
I tried to re-create another Linux template today using the steps in this procedure and for some reasons deploying VM from VRA was failing during the guest customisation. However, when I cloned the VM manually from vCenter and used the same customisation all went fine.

Then I repointed the vRA blueprint to just cloned VM and now I am able to deploy VMs from vRA.

Wednesday, 5 August 2015

A slightly more than a year ago I
bought the top specs Macbook Pro (i7, 16GB, 512 GB) being totally sure it will be sufficient to
run simple nested vSphere Lab. Honestly speaking I didn’t think through the
requirements and what exactly I want to run in it, I just wanted a new toy. When vSphere 6 Beta was
released it was a big surprise for me that 16GB of RAM is just enough to meet
minimum requirements for 2 hosts and vCenter. I am not even talking about
attempts to fit vSphere Horizon or vCloud Director setup in my nested lab. I used one quite powerful server at work for a while, but good time has passed very fast and it was definitely time to come up
with a new permanent solution.